Quotes by Zadie Smith

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

On BeautyNo, we could not itemize the listof sins they cant forgive us.The beautiful dont lack the wound.It is always beginning to snow.Of sins they cant forgive usspeech is beautifully useless.It is always beginning to snow.The beautiful know this.Speech is beautifully useless.They are the damned.The beautiful know this.They stand around unnatural as statuary.They are the damnedand so their sadness is perfect,delicate as an egg placed in your palm.Hard, it is decorated with their faceand so their sadness is perfect.The beautiful dont lack the wound.Hard, it is decorated with their face.No, we could not itemize the list. Cape Cod, May 1974

But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that Wow, I can draw or in my case Wow, I can read... You feel you have whats called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise youll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls.

Id decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.

She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time for anything else.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

American houses... she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?

A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city’s highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its façade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you. Hampstead Heath! Glory of London! Where Keats walked and Jarman fucked, where Orwell exercised his weakened lungs and Constable never failed to find something holy.

They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.

Jerome said, Its like, a family doesnt work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.

They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.

More silence; childrens silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

To her credit, though, Trace didnt lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older womans art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.

I don’t want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I’m not sitting up here like some tragic fallen woman every night dreaming of having your babies.” She began tracing a figure of eight with her fingernail along his stomach. The movement looked idle but the nail pressed in hard. “You realize of course that if it were the other way round there would be a law, there would be an actual law: John versus Jen in the high court. And John would put it to Jen that she did wilfully fuck him for five years, before dumping him without warning in the twilight of his procreative window, and taking up with young Jack-the-lad, only twenty-four years old and with a cock as long as my arm. The court rules in favor of John. Every time. Jen must pay damages. Huge sums. Plus six months in jail. No—nine. Poetic justice.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

The futures another country, man... And I still aint got a passport.

All tastes are expressions of belief.

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism was a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.